How to keep building muscle after the newbie gains

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:36 Muscle confusion confusion

02:47 Program hopping

05:47 Types of plateau

09:23 Work capacity

11:27 Outro

Transcript

When and how to change your training program is rarely talked about on social media, yet it’s crucial for long term success. When you start lifting all you need is some effort and consistency and you’ll reap your newbie gains. But after you’ve milked those sweet newbie gains, things get a lot harder and you need to become more meticulous. What I see in many of my clients is that they get stuck at this point. So in this video, I’m going to teach you how to adapt your training program to keep progressing long term and keep building muscle and strength past the newbie stages.

The first major mistake that I often see, especially in people that come from bodybuilding circles, is called muscle confusion. Muscle confusion, which I like to call muscle confusion confusion is the idea you need to shock your muscles to get them to grow, and your muscle should not adapt to the training program because then you’re no longer progressing. So you need to confuse the muscle every time you train it to keep progressing. This is completely backwards. The entire point of training is that your body adapts to the training. This is exemplified by the stress recovery adaptation curves, general adaptation syndrome, the specificity principle… Adaptation is literally the reason we train. Muscle growth and strength development are adaptations to the stress that we impose on our bodies. Multiple studies have found that excessive variety in your program does not benefit your gains, and actually shows a trend towards worse results, especially on a volume equated basis.

For example, the Damas et al. found that a group of strength training men, they trained one of their legs just doing sets of 9 to 12 reps to failure, adding weight whenever they got above that rep range, so implementing progressive overload; the other leg they implemented “muscle confusion” by doing a different workout every time. One of the workouts was the same workout that the standard group did, and then one workout was an eccentric only version. In one of the workouts they added sets, they went up to six sets, in one of the workouts they went higher in repetitions, and then they also tried to progress over time. And the result was that despite training with significantly more volume, they did not actually gain more muscle. The “confused leg” didn’t gain more muscle, even though it was trained with more volume. And normally in studies, we do see that when you add volume, because this wasn’t like an overly high volume study, you gain more muscle, provided you can recover from it, but that shouldn’t have been an issue in this study. And these results were replicated by Angleri et al. in 2022.

Another study by Baz-Valle et al. found that in strength trained men doing the same workout with the same exercises all the time led to non-significantly, but greater results than a group doing a different exercise every workout on a volume equated basis. So overall, it’s quite clear that doing a lot of variety in your program does not benefit your gains, and there’s no need to “confuse” your muscles. If anything, it seems to have a slightly worse results relative to the volume you put in. A mistake very closely related to muscle confusion is program hopping. Many people feel that they need a new program every 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and there’s absolutely no reason for it. It’s it doesn’t have any benefit. You could implement a new program just because you got bored of the last one, but you have to realize that you’re giving up some things when you change program.

When you do the same exercises the body adapts to those, and there’s a repeated bout effect that reduces muscle damage. Moreover, and this is probably the most important thing, sticking to a certain program of the same exercises allows you to implement progressive overload in the long run, and strength development in the short term is almost entirely unrelated to muscle growth. If you’re gaining strength on an exercise that you’ve only been doing for a couple of weeks, that doesn’t mean much. If I have you do, especially something like split squats, for example, you’re going to gain strength on that very rapidly. The reason for that is not because you’re getting bigger, the reason is primarily that your body is learning, specifically the motor cortex, the part of your brain that coordinates movement is learning to coordinate the movement better. You have better balance, the movement is more subtle, the body learns when to recruit the glutes, the hamstrings, how much antagonist co-activation there has to be… So it’s learning to perform that movement pattern.

Most of the strength gains you get in the early weeks of training are due to this coordination improvement, not due to muscle growth. There can be muscle growth, but you cannot measure it objectively with short term strength gains. In the long term strength and size correlate extremely strongly. I’ve talked many times about studies where you have powerlifters and you measure their strength and their, like, their powerlifting stats, Wilks score, IPF scores, they also measure their body composition. There is an extremely strong correlation between those. So in many of these competitions actually you could just put powerlifters in a DEXA scanner or a body composition scanner, the rankings would be almost identical to their competition rankings, which is kind of ironic because we tend to think of powerlifting as like the sport where you have massive distinction between strength and size, and powerlifters exemplify strength over size, but in reality, the bigger powerlifters are the better powerlifters.

Very consistently in research size and strength correlate extremely strongly in these types of athletes. So in the long run your strength gains are a good marker of your progression. And if you’re not progressing long term on certain exercises, if you don’t have at least a certain set of what I call benchmark exercises, then you don’t know if you’re getting more muscular. And if you don’t know if you’re getting more muscular, you don’t know if you are progressing, and therefore if you need to change your program. Because the best reason to change your program is because it’s not resulting in the desired training adaptations. And physiologically speaking that is essentially the only reason. All of your program modifications, other than for psychological reasons like variety or boredom, should be based on progression.

Progression is the number one criterion for how to adapt your training program. If you are progressing well, don’t fix what isn’t broken. If you are not progressing, you need to update the program because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So how exactly do you update a program based on your progression? Well, you need to look at the type of plateau or type of stagnation that you are experiencing. This is the chart I teach to my students in my online Personal Training Certification course. You have to look at the type of plateau and you can see here you have basically 3 types of plateaus: systemic, multiple exercises for the same body part and one exercise. If your plateau is limited to one exercise, your adjustments should probably be for that one exercise. What many people do is they start stalling on one or a few exercises, and they feel the need to update the entire program, or just switch program. That is still program hopping. You should have targeted adjustments that deal with the lack of progression that you are experiencing, and that fix that progression.

So if you have one exercise that’s not progressing, often what you can do is you can just update the progression model for that exercise. For example, you can decrease the rep targets with intensification. You can implement daily undulating periodization for that exercise. Reactive de-loads and plateau breakers are things you should pretty much always be doing. And if all else fails you can switch out that exact exercise. Sometimes it’s not realistic to progress on an exercise. For example, lateral raises. That’s not an exercise where you’re going to implement progressive overload on for years ahead of time. You know, like, your lifetime progression on a lateral raise might be up to 20 kilos, for many people -not even, so you’re just not going to implement progressive overload very long term for an exercise like that. But if it’s like squats, bench press, you know, the power lifts, the compound exercises, there you should be able to progress very long term and there it’s probably more important to keep those exercises in as a benchmark exercise and then change the accessory exercises to add variety to your program.

If your plateau is limited to multiple exercises, but for the same body part, then you probably need to update training parameters for that body part. And this is also quite common. You see that people, like women for example, they have trouble with their shoulders, and then you see that lateral raises, overhead presses and other shoulder exercises, they all kind of start stalling at the same time. You also see this in men when they’ve been training biceps and chest for much longer than other body parts, and then those body parts will start stalling sooner than, say, their legs. So in this case, you want to, in particular, look at the training volume. If you have simply gotten more advanced, then you might need higher training volumes for that body part. It could also be that the body part is you’re overtraining it. You see this with men that they devote too much attention to the chest and the mirror muscles as opposed to the non mirror muscles, in that case, you might benefit from a reduction in training program, but usually over the long term, as you get more advanced you should be able to handle higher training volumes instead of lower ones. Over your training career as a whole your training volume should probably be increasing on average.

If you have a systemic lack of progress, so you’re just not progressing at all, like there are multiple unrelated exercises that are not progressing that should be progressing, that means there’s something systemically wrong. So in this case, you should look at things like your training, your sleep, your stress levels, or simply your overall program design. If you set the volume at a certain level it might just be excessive, or it might be too little. One way that you can look at that to see if you have excessive volume or too little volume is to look at what happens if you implement an additional rest day. If you implement an additional rest day and then you do progress, that means the volume is probably too high and if you add volume and you start progressing faster than the volume was probably too low.

One issue there is that short term progress is not necessarily the same as long term progress. If you add some volume for strength development often that doesn’t immediately translate into gains, because strength is not as responsive to training volume as muscle growth. So don’t be discouraged if you add some sets and you don’t immediately see better progression. You should be progressing in some way, but it’s not like you’re going to see that you’re going to progress 50% faster or something. Another thing you can look at to see if your volume is too high or too low is your work capacity. In exercise science we have something called the fatigue index, which is essentially just how many reps you lose across sets. And most people, when they lose a lot of reps across sets, that indicates high fatigue. So if your reps, they stay at like 12, 12, 12, 12, that indicates there’s not a lot of fatigue. And in fact, you should be questioning your training efforts in this case because you’re probably not training close to failure. There should be neuromuscular fatigue and your reps should go down.

Some women have extremely high work capacity and they can train very hard and maintain their reps. Men, it’s very, very unlikely that you can do 4 sets, especially if your rest interval is not extremely long, you can hit the exact same reps every time if your first set was as many reps as possible. So if your work capacity is very high, like your reps, you don’t lose all of reps, that’s an indication you can probably increase the training volume, if your work capacity is very bad, you lose a lot of repetitions, your fatigue index is very high, and that’s an indication you probably benefit from a lower training volume. So this is basically the general template. I’m not going to go into the specifics in this video, because it would be essentially my 10 month course for how to implement a whole training program and how to adapt it over time, but I hope this gives you like a conceptual framework, what I feel a lot of people are missing, that you should base your program adjustments on the progress that you have. And if you are stalling, you’re not progressing as you like, your rate of progress is below that of the desired rate of progress, then you should make changes to your training program that specifically deal with the lack of progress that you are seeing. This goes for both your body composition progress, in your nutrition and in your training program, which is measured by strength development and your body composition changes.

Measure long term progress, in general, it’s good to stick to a certain program, or at least keep certain benchmark exercises in your program over the long term. This allows you to implement progressive overload, monitor that you are progressing and see where you are not progressing to make changes in your training program that specifically deal with the lack of progress that you’re seeing. And if you keep doing that, you keep iterating that process over time, then you should see that you have a program which gradually changes over time and continuously maintains your desired rate of progress.

Right. I hope that helps you make long term gains. If you like this ed-type of evidence based fitness content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.